eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

January 2011

01/17/2011

Romeo Dallaire, I discovered in the course of this video, was the U.N general in charge of the peace keeping mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. He goes back to Rwanda ten years later and reflects on why he was there, what the U.N. did and did not do to protect people in Rwanda, and how his experience both revealed to him who he was and shaped him. The title of the film, Shake Hands With the Devil conveys to the viewer the sense that there was in Rwanda, an “opportunity” to come face to face with evil – with the potential for human evil and the potential for human goodness. In M. Scott Peck’s book, People of the Lie, Peck argued that the essence of evil is not so much to be found in the refusal to be perfect. It is found in the refusal to see one’s own failures for what they are. "Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless,” he writes, “it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others." In Shake Hands With the Devil, we find a personality struggling to define for himself what his moral obligations were and what the moral obligations of the people who sent him were. We generally do not believe that our government has a moral obligation to give Social Security benefits, public education, or Medicare to citizens of other countries. In Rwanda, one might argued that we were not obligated to give police protection to a minority population. Indeed, we might argue that we here in America killed about 600,000 men in a Civil War between ourselves and we blame no one for not stepping in to stop us. We abandoned African Americans to a great deal of violence after the end of Reconstruction but we never hear an argument that some other country owed it to us to protect us from ourselves. Dalaire is convinced that those with power have a moral obligation to use it on behalf of the needy. In one of the century’s great glaring evidences of the power of the media to shape how we see the world and construct a sense of value in which to fit people and knowledge, during the Rwandan crisis, millions of Americans were watching the O.J. Simpson trial. Question for Comment: How do you determine what issues are worthy of your concern?

01/01/2011

"No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path." The Buddha

A PBS documentary about the life of the Buddha and how the life can be used to teach the basic ideas of the religion. I really haven’t much to say about it as it is the sort of movie that does what it sets out to do and leaves you with little in the way of controversy. Buddhism asserts that the Buddha was a man and that what he could do, anyone could do. While he clearly was something of a mystic, he approaches mystical questions with a rather scientific approach. The Buddha experiments in the area of the soul, looking for a solution to a problem – a problem of suffering. And he asserts that you will never find a solution to a problem if it is not defined in realistic terms.

In the classical Christian tradition, humanity’s problem cannot be solved by simply following the example of another human. In the Christian tradition, we need help from outside ourselves. Starting from two different assumptions about reality, two radically different solutions are presented.

Looking forward to teaching Comparative World religions again this coming term.

Question for Comment: So, what do you think is a human beings biggest Spiritual Problem?

“When time shall have softened the passion and prejudice, when the reason shall have﻿ stripped the mask from misrepresentation, then justice, holding﻿ evenly her seals, will require much of past censures and praise to change places.” Jefferson Davis

During the Middle Ages, there were monasteries that kept the documents of an earlier humanistic age safe, though mostly unread. And even so, there are people in the South that keep the Civil War alive under the surface of what appears to have been defeat. “The Old South was ploughed under, but the ashes are still warm” as the playwright Henry Miller once put it. Tony Horowitz’ Confederates in the Attic is a journalistic wandering into the world of a still simmering Confederacy. He interviews Civil War reenactors, museum curators, tour guides, Civil War battlefield park rangers, crackers, politicians, teachers, and historians of the period to explore the inner workers of that part of the South that might still be proud to call itself “unreconstructed.”

“In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago,” says one of his subjects. “Folks here don’t always see it that way. They think it is still half-time.” “People like me. We’re the keepers of the past.” “We were raised Methodist,” amother explains of her family’s history, “But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn’t time for both.” A Civil War reenactor he interviews points to a picture of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and says “When I read about them, I feel like man is a noble creature, like maybe humanity is just going through a bad patch.” “When I play a Northerner,” says a re-enactor who sometimes dons a blue uniform for reenactments, “I feel like the Russians in Afghanistan.” “American by birth,” Horowirtz reads on a baby’s t-shirt, “Rebel by the Grace of God.”

“They can remember the war all they want” says a black woman of the sorts of people who like to glorify the military exploits of their rebel ancestors, “so long as they remember they lost.”

Tony Horowitz has written a brilliant book about the tenacity and pliability of memory. History is a substance that does not modify itself so much in substance as in form. The hundreds of characters that file in and out of the narrative all have their uses for the History that they study, remember, fail to remember, and distort. Accuracy is not necessarily the primary aspect of value to the one remembering. “When I was younger, I could remember anything whether it happened or not,” Mark Twain wrote, “but I am getting old and soon I shall remember only the later.”